The History of Emoji

The roots of emoji

There is a common belief that NTT DoCoMo invented emoji. The history of emoji-like symbols, however, goes back further.

In October 1988, Sharp released a personal digital assistant called the PA-8500. It included 102 emoji-like symbols that could be displayed inline with text. A 2024 investigation by Emojipedia identified this as the oldest known emoji set.

Emoji first appeared on a mobile phone in November 1997, when J-Phone (now SoftBank) shipped the SkyWalker DP-211SW with 90 emoji. They were monochrome, 12x12 pixels each, and depicted numbers, sports, weather, and moon phases. Shigetaka Kurita himself acknowledged in a 2019 tweet that J-Phone was the pioneer on mobile phones. The handset sold poorly, though, and the emoji set was not carried over to other J-Phone devices, so it never gained widespread adoption.

i-mode and the original 176

In 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched its mobile internet service i-mode. For this service, a team of about 12 people led by Shigetaka Kurita designed 176 emoji. All 176 fit within 12x12 pixel grids and totaled roughly 3 kilobytes of data. The set reportedly took about four to six weeks to create.

The design drew on two main sources. One was "manpu," the symbolic visual language used in Japanese manga -- sweat drops, anger marks, hearts, and other signs that convey emotions through simple shapes. The other was everyday pictograms: weather forecast symbols, road signs, and similar visual shorthand. Weather, news, and location emoji were inspired by these real-world icons. The heart symbol on Pocket Bell pagers, popular among young people at the time, also served as an early example of how pictographic symbols could fit into casual communication.

Teenagers adopted i-mode emoji quickly. Emoji became a routine part of mobile messaging in Japan, filling in emotional nuance that plain text could not convey. By the early 2000s, they were an everyday communication tool for Japanese mobile users.

In October 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York added the original 176 emoji to its permanent collection. An exhibition titled "Inbox: The Original Emoji" ran from December 2016 through March 2017.

The carrier emoji wars

In the 2000s, following NTT DoCoMo's success, KDDI (au) and SoftBank each developed their own emoji sets with hundreds of designs. The three sets were incompatible. Each carrier had assigned emoji to proprietary extension areas within Shift-JIS or ISO-2022-JP, so the same byte sequence could point to entirely different emoji depending on the carrier.

Sending an email across carriers often resulted in garbled emoji or unintended substitutions. A heart sent from one carrier might display as a completely unrelated icon on another. Conversion tables existed between carriers, but coverage was incomplete, and the results were frequently confusing for users.

This incompatibility was characteristic of Japan's feature phone (garakei) era, when each carrier built walled gardens of services and content. The confusion became one of the factors that pushed emoji toward Unicode standardization -- though vendor-specific design differences would persist even after standardization.

Smartphones open the door

In 2008, emoji began moving beyond the mobile carrier world.

In October 2008, Google added 79 animated emoji to Gmail. Internally called "goomoji," they were limited to emails sent to Japan's three major carriers, but they were one of the first cases of a web email service supporting emoji.

The following month, in November 2008, Apple added an emoji keyboard to iOS 2.2. It included 471 emoji glyphs based on SoftBank's emoji set. Initially, only users in Japan could access it; users elsewhere had to unlock the keyboard through third-party apps. This restriction lasted about three years, until iOS 5.

The iPhone accelerated the shift from feature phones to smartphones. As that transition progressed, engineers across the industry began to agree that the carrier-fragmented emoji needed a unified standard.

Integration into Unicode

In January 2009, Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg of Apple, together with Markus Scherer and Mark Davis of Google, submitted an emoji encoding proposal to the Unicode Consortium. The goal was to create a unified Unicode representation for the emoji that Japan's three carriers had been encoding in proprietary extensions of Shift-JIS and ISO-2022-JP.

In October 2010, Unicode 6.0 was released and emoji were officially standardized. The release added 608 new emoji code points, which combined with 114 characters already present in Unicode 5.2 to form a standard set of 722 emoji. The three carriers' proprietary sets were merged into a single code point scheme, establishing the first real foundation for emoji interoperability.

Unicode defines code points and names, but leaves visual design to each vendor. As a result, the same emoji still looks different on Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft. For technical details by version, see the "Unicode versions and the evolution of emoji" topic.

Emoji go global

In 2011, Apple included the emoji keyboard globally in iOS 5. It could be enabled by anyone in the Settings app, with no third-party app required. About three years after the Japan-only release in iOS 2.2, iPhone users worldwide could finally use emoji as a built-in feature. This triggered rapid adoption in English-speaking countries.

Emoji went from a texting add-on to a part of pop culture. They appeared in movies and merchandise, and the English word "emoji" -- a loanword from Japanese -- entered dictionaries. Use of the word itself more than tripled year-over-year by the mid-2010s.

In November 2015, Oxford Dictionaries chose the emoji as its Word of the Year -- the first pictograph selected since the award began in 2004. The choice was Face with Tears of Joy. According to a joint study with SwiftKey, this emoji accounted for 20% of all emoji usage in the UK in 2015 (up from 4% the previous year) and 17% in the US (up from 9%).

Every year on July 17, World Emoji Day is celebrated around the world. The date comes from Apple's iCal app, which was announced at Macworld Expo 2002 and displayed July 17 on its icon. The calendar emoji has kept that date ever since. In 2014, Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge established the day as World Emoji Day.

The age of diversity

In June 2015, Unicode 8.0 introduced skin tone modifiers. Five skin tones based on the Fitzpatrick Scale -- developed in 1975 by American dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick -- were defined, bringing the total to six options including the default yellow. This was a response to criticism about the lack of racial diversity in earlier emoji sets.

Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) sequences also expanded what emoji could represent. A ZWJ is an invisible connecting character that combines multiple emoji into one. This made it possible to express various combinations of family composition, profession, and gender. For example, "woman" + ZWJ + "laptop" produces "woman technologist" 👩‍💻. Same-sex couples and diverse family structures are also made possible through ZWJ.

Gender-neutral emoji were added as well. Professions and activities that previously came only in male or female versions gained gender-unspecified options. Firefighters, judges, scientists, and other professions that had not previously been represented as emoji were added. The direction of emoji evolution is toward letting anyone pick an emoji that looks like them.

The future of emoji

Over 3,000 emoji are now registered in the Unicode standard. Each year, the Unicode Consortium receives proposals for new emoji from around the world, and they are evaluated against selection criteria before being added. Anyone can submit a proposal, and the evaluation considers factors such as whether the emoji is likely to be widely used and whether it represents something not already covered by existing emoji. The jellyfish emoji, for instance, was added in Unicode 15.0 in 2022 after years of proposals and discussion.

The count has grown from 102 symbols on Sharp's PA-8500 in 1988, to 176 on i-mode in 1999, to over 3,000 in use worldwide today. Devices and platforms have changed, but the attempt to fill in what text alone cannot convey with small pictures continues.

Emoji started in a 12x12 pixel grid. It took nearly 40 years for them to reach screens around the world.